Cover of Marseille Mix. Photograph: courtesy of AA Publications

 

Cover of Mediterranean Crossroads. Photograph: courtesy of the University of Minnesota Press

Marseille Mix
William Firebrace
London: AA Publications, 2010, 248 pp., £ 18.00
ISBN 978-1-902902-95-1

Mediterranean Crossroads: Marseille and Modern Architecture
Sheila Crane
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, xi, 352 pp., 104 b/w and 16 colour ill., $ 27.50 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-8166-5362-1

When Gaston Deferre died his safety deposit box was found to contain his socialist party membership card, letters from de Gaulle, and a copy of Le surréalisme au service de la révolution. Deferre, as well as being one of Francois Mitterrand’s closest collaborators and the author of France’s disastrous decentralisation during the early years of that presidency, was the mayor of Marseille from 1953 to 1986. Towards the end of Marseille Mix, William Firebrace’s cautiously passionate meditation on the city, he speculates that Deferre was an occluded surrealist who created a surrealist city ‘with tower blocks beside village squares, with raised motorways crossing beside a cathedral [...] with a beach named after himself decorated with a five metre high replica of Michelangelo’s David.’

To those who stroll through this labyrinth composed of multitudinous labyrinths, to those who hare through it on ice-cream-coloured Vespas, Firebrace’s genial contention must seem unexceptionable, unquestionably correct—save that, perhaps, Deferre was not the only surrealist at work. If any city in the world characterizes Lautréamont’s ‘beau […] comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d’une machine à coudre et d’un parapluie,’ it is Marseille. On a scale larger even than the Staglieno cemetery in Genoa, Marseille is a perpetual and unfinished work of collective surrealism.

It is improbable that Sheila Crane had this in mind when she wrote Mediterranean Crossroads: Marseille and Modern Architecture. In her far from fanciful investigation into the minutiae of the city’s urbanistic growth in the last century, she does not articulate such a thought. But her work insouciantly supports the notion of a city that resists or sabotages or undermines attempts to impose on it order, reason, neatness; a city which is, ultimately, a litany of urbanistic failures, of utopian-transportational failures (Atlantropa proposed building dams across the Mediterranean), of thwarted and aborted schemes, of piecemeal developments which run out of money and run into projects with which they share no congruence of purpose or scale or style. This is a city which yearned for a Haussmann or a Cerda and mercifully never got one.

What it got was people such as the Beaux Arts landscape designer Jacques Gréber and the tectonically bombastic Eugène Beaudouin. In his Paris atelier Gréber relied on photographic views taken from the celebrated transporter bridge at the harbour’s mouth, a structure whose skeletan functionalism he wished unastonishingly to rid the city of. Gréber possessed a typically French preoccupation with skyline—a preoccupation that goes back to the Renaissance and is manifest in the attempt to suture restless roofs onto classical buildings: the only man to give his name to a roof is French, François Mansart.

Partly because it is Mediterranean, and partly because it disacknowledges the nation it happens to be situated in but doesn’t really belong to, Marseille does not share this preoccupation with silhouette. The exception is Notre Dame de la Garde, one of three hearteningly uncompromising mid-nineteenth century colossi by the master and pupil pair of Léon Vaudoyer and Henri-Jacques Espérandieu; the other two are the Palais Longchamp and the Cathédrale de Sainte Marie La Majeure. Gréber’s plans came to nothing. Nor did those of Beaudouin, vastly more ambitious and made in response to Pétain’s ambition to turn Marseille into ‘what Alexandria was for the ancient world.’ Beaudouin’s plans were distended and boorish, out of Speer by de Chirico. Pétain’s prime minister, Pierre Laval, would enthusiastically proclaim ‘we are going to cleanse Marseille; it badly needs it.’

The occupying Germans did it for him, though they had perhaps less taste for the destruction of the northern side of the Vieux Port than Beaudouin and other French enthusiasts had for the psychopathology of partir à zero, i.e., raze everything. Beaudouin, thwarted in Marseille, would later dump the vast anti-social housing project of Les Minguettes on Lyon. The post-war projects which did make it from paper to stone and concrete were Fernand Pouillon’s rebuilding of the Vieux Port’s south side and Le Corbusier’s first Cité Radieuse—the many others which would have stood beside it and the Marseillveyre mountains were never even begun. For all its global celebrity—it is sort of Santiago de Compostela or Mecca for observant architects—its site in the southern suburbs means that it is apart from the city. It doesn’t impinge: its roof’s sculptural gestures instead bind it to two thousand years of Mediterranean culture.

Pouillon’s works at La Tourette and on the very quayside inevitably define the city because they are at its very heart. La Tourette defines it in terms of its congruence with North Africa. The vaguely martial buildings on the quay, however, are stripped classical, ‘in-keeping’ but tough not timid, a compromise between the dogged modernism of Le Havre’s reconstruction and the neo-vernacular of St Malo’s.

The lack of consensus, the subsequently piecemeal pattern, the ragged incorporation of former villages, the sheer profusion of terrains vagues, the concussive dislocations and contrapuntal clashes—these are the qualities that make Marseille an unwittingly surrealist city, which render it susceptible to representations. It is magnetic subject matter; coarsely, it provides great copy, startling sights. Lázló Moholy-Nagy and Germaine Krull photographed it. Jean-Pierre Melville and Marcel Pagnol filmed it. Jean-Claude Izzo and Philippe Carresse wrote about it.

Whilst Sheila Crane concentrates in precise detail on the aesthetic politics which have shaped or neglected to shape the city, William Firebrace adds to its literature. He is at once keen dragoman, critic, poet, constantly astonished spectator, and informal reporter. His curiosity is boundless. His methods are improvisatory, accretive, collagist. It is not notably rational but, then, neither is his subject. An added delight is that the chapter headings are set in fonts (Mistral, Choc, Calypso) designed by the incomparable Marseillais typographer Roger Excoffon. Nothing very rational about them either.

Jonathan Meades
Writer and broadcaster
Marseille, France